Civil rights pioneer James Meredith says he has changed his feelings toward the statue of him on the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi, now thinking it's not such a bad thing.

The Daily Mississippian, the university newspaper, reports Meredith expressed his feelings over the weekend while attending a Black Alumni Reunion on the Ole Miss campus in Oxford.

"This is really a time for change in me and in what I'm going to do," the newspaper reported Meredith saying during the event.

Meredith, who now lives in Jackson, touched off riots when he integrated the Ole Miss campus, about 85 miles south of Memphis, in 1962.

Meredith has opposed the statue honoring him, near the iconic Lyceum, since it was unveiled in 2006. He has said both it and the Confederate statue on the circle in front of the Lyceum should be removed.

But now, he told the newspaper, he thinks the more measured approach of administrators, who have been working to untangle the university's Old South symbolism for years, is a smarter approach than removing statues.

The Meredith statue has been a frequent point of controversy. In 2015, a former Ole Miss student received a six-month prison sentence after he and two other Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity members placed a noose and an old Georgia state flag, containing the Confederate battle emblem, on the statue.

The Confederate statue was rammed by a pickup last year, damaging a historical marker added to provide context. It was not clear if the action, which occurred on a Saturday night, was intentional.

More: Marker dedicated at site where James Meredith was shot

During the 2016 dedication of a marker in Hernando, noting the location where Meredith was shot in 1966 as he was doing the "March Against Fear" from Memphis to Jackson, Meredith said he was confident his home state would come to grips with its troubled racial history.

"Mississippi is the center of the black-white, rich-poor universe," he said. "If Mississippi can't come up with the solution to the problem of the day, it can't be done. I'm very confident it's going to get done."